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Health Wonk Review: Back to School Daze

Ah Labor Day! A final blush of summer before jumping back to work and into the school year. Here’s a pretty serious set of posts as you settle back in to the fall routine.

The opioid epidemic

Managed Care Matterstells tales from the front lines of the opioid epidemic. Not pretty. Not pretty at all.

Health Affairs Blog shares insights on the development of a “safe space and medical monitoring to prevent overdose deaths” in Boston. This excellent post describes the observation and treatment facility (which is not a supervised injection facility) and lays out five policy lessons learned to date.

Insurance and the Affordable Care Act?

The Obamacare insurance exchanges are in somewhat rough shape, but as Wright on Health explains, there are some pretty straightforward fixes. Politics (as usual) is likely to get in the way.

If you were somehow under the illusion that Health Care Renewal was a fan of managed care mergers (and for-profit, managed care companies in general) this week’s post should erase any doubt. In fact, it’s a trip down memory lane from the early 1990s formation of Aetna and its merger with US Healthcare to today’s politically motivated withdrawal from the exchanges to retaliate for the government’s opposition to a new mega-merger.

Oh boy. Insurance is about spreading risk, but you have to be pretty darn to big to spread around the expense of a $1 million/month chronically ill patient. That’s what Wellmark is having to do, and InsureBlogsays good for them, it’s insurance working the way insurance should.

Ready for the fourth Obamacare open enrollment period, coming up in November? Healthinsurance.orghas a guide to what’s new.

Technology and population health

Is that the best we can do? HealthBlawg does not think health systems deserve credit for leveraging Uber to get people to their appointments. Telemedicine is the way to go, instead.

Population Health Blog, on the other hand, applauds the potential of personalized, tech-enabled approach to diet.

Like HealthBlawg, The Hospital Leader wants to focus on social determinants of health to keep people out of the hospital.

Drugs are pricey

Healthcare Economist describes various value frameworks that can help life sciences companies evaluate and justify the value of innovative approaches.

I made a few new enemies at Health Business Blog with my contention that EpiPen prices may still be too low.

And Health System Ed rounds out the wonkery with a post on drug prices, EHRs, and the Affordable Candidate. Big topics all!